Donna Karan / Spring 2013 RTW

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Even, it seems, Donna Karan cannot live by fast and furious urbanity alone. She dubbed her spring 2013 collection “Sunrise, Sunset,” a paean to those quiet, reflective moments that strike even the great dirty heaving metropolis that is New York City, when dawn casts a gradually warming glow over the skyscrapers and gently tugs it away at the end of the day, only to repeat the whole process all over again twelve or so hours later. (Given that the models were, to a woman, sporting vermilion eye shadow, perhaps they’re coming into New York off the red-eye from LaGuardia.) Anyway, this was essentially Karan’s romantic and wistful vision of the isle of Manhattan, one unabashedly played out in the clothes: Empire-line dresses that spun away from the body with spiral-cut skirts; jackets cut on the bias to cleave to the body, somewhat Asiatic in feeling, and denuded of any visible fastenings; and artfully folded and draped full skirts that fell in overlapping planes of fabric, not unlike the way the Hudson River glistens in the morning. (To fully take in this poetic experience, I am not saying you won’t have to screw up your eyes a little, thus diminishing the sight of the police boats scudding by at all hours of the day and night.)

Karan isn’t the only designer engaged in thinking about exactly what “urban” clothes should—and need to—currently look like. There has been a general consensus these past few days that “tough” and “hard” have played themselves out—unsurprising, really, given that for 99 percent of us tough and hard would describe our day-to-day experience of living in the world, especially nowadays. Karan’s more languid, ethereal, and loosened-up approach is where we seem to be heading. Of course, become too soft and dreamy and things, ironically, can only get tougher and harder when it comes to the prosaic act of getting dressed day in, day out. So, Karan’s best move was to render much of this collection in the papery, crumpled Japanese-style cottons that have been making an appearance this New York; they look lived in, that they’ve been around the block, but still pretty and poetic, especially, as she did, colored pearly gray or blush pink. This time around, Karan had no recourse to black. That would have been another fantasy of New York, and a whole other collection.